So enquires German philosopher Adorno of his student-turned-extorter, who claims to possess the material influential academic Walter Benjamin smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Paris shortly before his death.

Yet the question could be addressed to Carl Djerassi, inventor of the Pill, who, in his Seventies, swapped science for playwriting.

Perhaps aptly, his Foreplay is almost entirely build-up. And what painfully painstaking build-up, with Adorno, wife Gretel and rival intellectual Hannah Arendt regularly halting the action to verbalise shared history.